What you need to know
- Microsoft shared its roadmap for Microsoft Edge for the near future.
- Microsoft states that feedback has already been used to improve the browser.
- Some popular features that are currently planned include inking on PDFs and enabling search in the extensions store.
Microsoft is sharing quite a bit of news today about its browser, Microsoft Edge. In addition to the Chromium version of the browser entering a public beta and a new feature being added to the Canary channel, Microsoft also shared its roadmap for the browser for the near future.
The blog post is the first of many that highlights how feedback shapes Microsoft Edge. In this first entry, Microsoft's David Rubino points out that several features have been improved as a result of feedback including dark theme, built-in Bing Translate, privacy controls, the favorites bar, Reading View, and signing-in and syncing to AAD accounts.
The post also outlines changes that Microsoft plans to address in the Canary channel this September:
- An option to prevent auto-play of video and audio when you open a website
- A round of improvements to scrolling experience, with more (including performance) to come down the line
- The addition of a favorites button to the toolbar, to provide quicker access to favorites
In October, Microsoft plans to address several other areas of Edge:
- Inking on PDFs
- When you sign-in to the browser, your sign-in profile picture will accurately be kept up to date.
- When you have more than one profile, better handling for opening links and attachments in the appropriate profile.
- An option to set your own photos as the background image on the New Tab Page
- Enable search in the extensions store
- A bug fix for users who receive an "Administrator Mode Detected" notification (advising them to close and relaunch the browser in non-administrator mode) each time they launch Edge
- ClickOnce deployment of Windows applications from web pages
Microsoft also has a list of feature request that it is currently reviewing, including allowing users to sign-in to the browser using a Google Account and supporting themes from the Chrome Web Store.
There are also plans to improve a few specific areas of the browser based on feedback, including reducing CPU and memory usage, improving scrolling, improving the reliability of updates, and fixing drop-down menus.
